First Paragraph:
Political parties in parliamentary democracies compete for
support by communicating appeals to the electorate during
periodic election campaigns. Election campaigns are an
especially important period of party competition because
they occur at a time of heightened competition in which
parties attempt to communicate favorable messages to the
electorate. The electorate's awareness and the impact of
this communication on the electorate is high because of the
forthcoming vote decision. The messages communicated to the
electorate may be analyzed by a systematic evaluation of the
content and form of the campaign communication produced by
political parties.

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1: Mean values on the economic and social values
issue guestions by party vote in the East and West
Table 1: Voting in the 1994 Bundestag election by social
class (%)
Table 2: Time-of-vote decision by party and electorate: 1994
Bundestag election
Figure 2: Communicated issue emphasis of the German
political parties based on an analysis of the television
campaign commercials 1983-94
Table 3: Candidate-orientated appeals in television campaign
commercials (%)
Table 4: Issue vs candidate-orientated appeals in television
campaign commercials (%)
Table 5: Degree of attack: positive vs negative appeals in
television campaign commercials (%)
Table 6: Temporal reference: television campaign commercials
(%)

Last Paragraph:
This research suggests that the discipline's static models,
which attempt to fix the nature of party competition, should
yield to dynamic models which acknowledge that the strategic
responses of parties to change in their electoral
environment alters the nature of party competition in a
party system. A dynamic model of party competition which
requires one to analyze the electoral environment and the
strategic adaptation of parties assists in the understanding
of election campaigns as a key mass--elite linkage
institution in modern democracies.